A man looks on as French authorities demolish the Calais refugee camp.
Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

When it comes to tackling the European asylum and refugee crisis, Britain left Europe years ago.

In fact it is a direct result of Tony Blair’s famous 1997 Amsterdam treaty “opt-out” from EU immigration and asylum matters that Theresa May has been able to distance Britain from the worst refugee crisis since the second world war.

Only when the crisis was in danger of lapping at Britain’s own shores – either through the supposed “invasion” from the Calais camp or through heart-rending footage of refugees dying in the Mediterranean – did British politicians feel the need to act.

While Angela Merkel made a humanitarian response of opening Germany’s borders to hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, May as home secretary was arguing that providing search and rescue ships in the Med acted as “an unintended ‘pull factor’, encouraging more migrants to attempt the dangerous sea crossing and thereby leading to more tragic and unnecessary deaths”.

May, who was Britain’s longest serving interior minister, went further than simply sitting out the European refugee crisis.

In her 2015 Conservative party conference speech she described an asylum system that gave refugee status to those who reached Britain and Europe as “rewarding the wealthiest, the luckiest and the strongest” and which failed the most vulnerable.

Instead she proposed a two-tier system that would discourage people from making the perilous journey to Europe. They would be given more temporary forms of protection while those brought direct to the UK through resettlement programmes would retain longer-term protection. May even went as far as going to the United Nations and launching an appeal to reform the international legal definition of asylum and refugee status.

Refugees wait on the deck of a Spanish vessel after being rescued off the Libyan coast in February. Photograph: David Ramos/Getty Images

The UNHCR has said it finds her proposal for “differentiated treatment” of refugees to be legally unsound, and that the British government has “activated a pause” on the proposed policy.

Nevertheless May has pursued exactly this policy in practice in Britain’s response to the European refugee crisis. The paradox is that while Britain was almost alone in refusing, even in principle, to take part two years ago in a European solution to the crisis, it is May’s policy that now commands majority support within Europe.

Britain has insisted that refugees claim asylum in the first safe country they come to, while being one of the biggest humanitarian aid donors to support those countries that have taken in the largest number of Syrian refugees outside Europe, including Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.

May is a strong supporter of the recent EU-Turkey agreement to reduce the flow of refugees across the Aegean and has provided significant numbers of asylum staff to Italy and Greece to help process asylum claims and facilitate rapid return of those who are rejected.

Closer to home, May and her home secretary, Amber Rudd, did everything they could to resist opening up a legal route to Britain for those asylum seekers who made it to the Calais refugee camp. In the face of a public outcry over the humanitarian conditions in the camp they finally agreed to take 750 lone children as the price of securing its closure and clearance.

This is not to say that the biggest refugee crisis since the war has not provoked a strong humanitarian response among the British public as it has in the rest of Europe.

Demonstrators in Berlin in November 2015. Photograph: Carsten Koall/Getty Images

When the outcry has been at its most acute, British politicians have responded. David Cameron first made the commitment to bring 20,000 of the most vulnerable Syrian refugees to Britain over the next five years on a direct resettlement programme. In the face of further pressure, Cameron agreed to bring a further 3,000 lone child refugees from the Middle East. In the face of opposition from May, who was then his home secretary, he appeared to concede that a further 3,000 lone children should be brought from within Europe. But with May firmly in Downing Street that was reduced to just 350 in February.

There is one area, however, where Britain has been keen to develop a common European asylum and refugee approach and that is in the field of databases. Britain has opted in to the Schengen intelligence systems while not being part of its open borders and pushed hard to develop fingerprinting of all migrants on arrival.

May declared in her 2015 conference speech that “not in a thousand years” would she take part in a new common EU immigration and asylum policy. But as Germany’s hopes of sharing the responsibility across the EU for the refugee crisis have soured, so May’s approach has become the common European response.

More common effort is now being put into sealing the Mediterranean and the Aegean than resettling those refugees already in Europe. When it comes to refugee policy, Britain may not have joined Europe but Europe is rapidly joining Britain.